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Crazy Connector Cables

I’ve spent the last two days building a cable to connect a 7.2″ Kyocera color LCD panel to a Ziatech controller. The Ziatech connector is a 50 pin ribbon cable and the Kyocera is a 31 pin cable. Some pins on one side have multiple connection on the other and some of the connections (like contrast) require variable voltages that have to be obtained by inserting potentiometers inline. The result so far is a rats nest of wiring. Fortunately, a special adapter board is being designed for the final product that the two different ribbon cables can just snap into. Then there’s the inverter that powers the backlight. 12v DC in, 1200v AC out – don’t touch it. Well, it’s a change from software anyway.

Speaking of software, I sent Raph another load of patches for mod_virgule including a fix to prevent a nifty little DoS attack I discovered this week and changes to the render functions to make them at least approximate legal HTML. Sounds like Raph’s got his hands full though, so I don’t know when we’ll see any of them integrated (maybe it’s time to pass the code on to another maintainer so development can continue?).